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Aphids!

I was out surveying my garden domain on Friday night, feeling really happy with how things were growing, when upon closer inspection of the largest orange pepper plant, I spotted a bunch of tiny green bugs covering the new growth in the center of the plant. ACK, APHIDS!!

Somehow, I thought I was immune to these pests. I'd never noticed them in previous gardens... and thus I had no idea how to combat them. "I need to get my You Grow Girl book RIGHT NOW!" I said to Al, even before grabbing my camera to snap this photo:

I quickly looked up the bug spray recipes I'd noticed on prior readings, and was happy to learn that I had all the ingredients I needed on hand. (I can't remember what I thought I was going to do with that lemon I bought last week, but it's now been put to good use.) I chopped up the lemon peel and set it in a bowl of boiling water to steep, then grabbed the already-peeled garlic from the fridge. There were two packets left, so I threw those into a second bowl of boiling water. I then measured out a heaping tablespoon of cayenne powder and dumped it in with the garlic. I briefly lamented not having an onion until I remembered the bag of chopped onion I'd stashed in the freezer. It might not be as good as fresh, but it was better than nothing.

On Saturday morning I went to the gym, then stopped at Whole Foods to look for spray bottles. They only had the kind used for perfume and essential oils, so I bought one and figured I'd rinse out an almost-empty bottle of Method grapefruit surface spray and use that for the other mix.

The lemon oil solution was much easier to strain than the garlic-onion-pepper mix, so I started with that. I strained it into an empty bottle of Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Castile Soap to take advantage of the soap's bug-killing qualities, then poured it into the sprayer. After three or four applications some of the aphids were jumping off the plant and running along the soil and the edge of the pot, but too many seemed to be surviving.

In between assaults with the lemon oil spray, I blended up and started straining the garlic-onion-pepper mix. That process took forever thanks to the powdered cayenne, but I eventually got a double-strained mixture into the bottle. In preparing for the pepper assault, I neglected to put on vinyl gloves or even shoes—a rather large mistake. My hands and feet were tingling/burning all day after the first round of pepper spraying. By the third pepper assault (after a thunderstorm), I'd learned my lesson.

After spending so much time on the most obvious victims in the garden, I thought I'd just check the other plants to see if they were OK. The tomatoes all appear to be healthy and uninfested, but a closer inspection of the red pepper plants and a small yellow pepper—both planted a few weeks ago—revealed more aphids. I hit those with the pepper spray, too.

This morning the red pepper and small yellow pepper seemed OK, but the large yellow pepper and large orange pepper showed a few living aphids still clinging to tender leaves. I hit them with the pepper spray again and will continue to do so until either all of the aphids die, or the plants do.